Friends, our teaching scripture this morning comes from Luke
chapter 16, verses 19 to 31. It says there was a rich man who
was dressed in purple and fine linen, and who feasted
sumptuously every day, and at his gate lay a poor, poor man
named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his
hunger with what fell from the rich man's table.
Even the dogs would come and lick his sores.
The poor man died, and was carried away by the angels to be
with Abraham. The rich man also died, and was
buried in Hades, where he was being tormented.
He lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by
his side. He called out, Father Abraham,
have mercy on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his
finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in agony in
these flames. But Abraham said, Child,
remember that during your lifetime you received your good
things and Lazarus in like manner evil things, but now he
is comforted here and you are in agony.
Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been
fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you
cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.
He said, Then I beg you, father, to send him to my father's
house, for I have 5 brothers, that he may warn them, so that
they will not also come into this place of torment.
Abraham replied, They have Moses and the prophets, they should
listen to them, He said. No, father Abraham, but if
someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.
And he said to him, if they do not listen to Moses and the
prophets, neither will they be convinced.
Even if someone rises from the dead, this is the word of the
Lord. Good morning.
It's good to be with you this morning.
See some brand new faces and faces that I haven't seen in a
long, long time. And I was just sitting there
doing worship, thinking about how wonderful it is that the
church is such a place where anyone can come in and anyone
can be reunited. And it's like one of the only
places in the world where those things are true.
And I just love that. So what a strange story.
I, I think actually that this particular story of Jesus is one
of the strangest stories that Jesus tells.
It starts out, you know, like most stories, Jesus almost
always opens his stories the same way, you know, things like,
you know, there was once a man or a man had two sons or, or
there was a couple and they were throwing this giant feast.
And, and this is sort of Jesus's way of letting you know that
he's about to tell a story. And these are the stories that
we, we call the parables. This is a parable of Jesus.
So if you're getting a little distraction, you know, about
like man, there's so many details in that story.
This is a made-up story. It's not real, but this is how
Jesus begins his story. It's how we know it's a parable.
And so the first thing to remember is that it's a story
that Jesus is telling a specific group of people, because Jesus
has taken on the role of a rabbi and a prophet, and he's going
around all of these different villages and cities.
And he's he's telling these stories to try to help people
understand what it means that God is sort of on the move.
And the Kingdom of God is spilling out into the world and
people are following him and he's trying to help them make
sense of that. All of the, the stuff that Jesus
is saying, he's saying stuff about the Kingdom of God and
about what the Kingdom looks like and about how the Kingdom
comes and about what the proper response to the Kingdom might be
and what it looks like to miss out on the Kingdom, what it
looks like to not see it, to not notice what's happening.
So strange story, but how, how does the story work?
I want to start there. There is a rich man who's
dressed in purple and fine linen, who feasted sumptuously
every day. When's the last time you heard
the word sumptuously read out loud to you?
Had to practice that one a little bit.
Hang on to that picture of a rich man, fine purple linen,
feasting every single day. We're going to come back to that
idea. And at his gate lay a poor man
named Lazarus who was covered in sores.
He's probably battling leprosy who longed to satisfy his hunger
with what fell from the rich man's table.
Even the dogs would come and lick his sores.
So there's this rich man named Lazarus and he dies and he's,
he's taken to be with Father Abraham, the one that we read
about in the Hebrew Scriptures and is being tended to with
comfort and with ease, with really good things on the other
side of life. And it just so happens that the
rich man also dies and he is taken into the afterlife.
And it's almost as though their fortunes are switched.
The one who had great comfort in this life gets agony in the
next. And the one who has great agony
and pain and suffering in this life gets comfort and ease in
the next life. Remember, this is a story.
Jesus is not talking about what happens in the afterlife in this
story. So don't get confused, Jesus is
one of the best storytellers, but this is not new material.
The story would have been a very popular story in the ancient
world, maybe as close to a meme as they ever got.
So in Egyptian literature and in Jewish literature there are
there are both written stories and oral traditions about the
fate of men who lived in this life being swapped in the
afterlife. Stories just like this one where
a rich and a wealthy man who lives a life of comfort ends up
struggling on the other side of death and a man who struggles in
this life gets the good life in the next one.
It's kind of an ancient trope as well worn as the plot line to a
ROM com from the 90s. OK, it's very normal kind of
story and where you were in the social structure of society
would of course 'cause you to hear this story in a particular
way. So if you were poor or
distressed or you lived a life of suffering, the way that this
story would work on you would to have you judge the wealthy and
those who were walking around in fine clothes.
The story might have provided some relief, knowing that at
least it seemed possible that maybe on the other side of death
this really wealthy rich guy was going to get it.
And I'll get comforted in the next slide.
And if you heard this story and you were one of the wealthy and
the well fed, you might hear this story and assume that this
is just the kind of story that poor people and suffering people
tell themselves to make them feel better.
Stories about your fate or your neighbor's fate in the
afterlife. The way they worked on you is
they would have this effect of distracting you from the reality
of your real life and the real life of your neighbor, the
reality of the great chasm that would have separated the rich
man and the poor man. So the story itself, the way
that it worked, was to distract you from reality.
It's a way of dismissing the distance that lies between you
and someone else simply based on the level level of suffering
that either exists or doesn't exist between your two worlds.
Or what a cute little story that it is that these suffering
people tell to make themselves feel better.
So, friends, the very presence of this kind of story as it made
its rounds in the culture means that the people that the Kingdom
of God is supposed to bring together, the ones who need help
and the ones who have the capacity to help, they don't end
up coming together because they're so caught in this sort
of otherworldly, fanciful story that they can't seem to see what
is actually happening right in front of them.
That is how the story would have worked and operated in society.
Does that make sense? So Jesus is, is telling a very
well worn and well known story, this story of, of, of, of
fortunes switching. And the way that the story
worked would have, would have worked like distraction.
OK, so what's the story about? Let's keep going.
There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine
linen, who feasted sumptuously. Sumptuously, sumptuously, every
day. Go ahead and try it three times.
Sumptuously sumptuous. OK.
The story is about a man who, after he dies, realizes that
he's made a mistake. He was so caught up in the fine
clothes and the good food and the pursuit of fine dining that
he apparently walked right by the poor and the hungry man with
sores on his body every single day without taking much notice.
And then in the afterlife, he sees the man across this great
chasm. But even then, the way that he
interacts with him in the afterlife is to assume that the
poor man could do his bidding. Hey, send that guy back to my
family so that he can be my servant to tell my brothers
about what was happening here in this life.
And the interesting thing about this story that Jesus is telling
is that he gives one of the characters a name.
And it's the only parable of the more than 40 parables that Jesus
gave where someone has a name. So probably something that we
should pay attention to. Let's assume that maybe
something significant is going on for the simple fact that
Jesus has named one of the characters in the story.
The poor man with sores is called Lazarus, which is a
popular name in the time. But more than that, it's the
simple fact that in the ancient Near Eastern culture, names
carry with it significance and meaning.
But the significance in the story of the poor man being
named Lazarus is the fact that the name Lazarus comes from the
Hebrew name Eliazar, which literally means the one who God
helps. Which is Jesus's way of
highlighting and underscoring the fact that the very one who
God was there to help is the one that the rich and the well fed
man did not help. Oh man, it's getting good right?
What a great story that the street corner with the beggar is
where God's presence was the whole time.
And the man living behind the gate was so busy planning the
menu of his next dinner party that he could see that he could
not see where God was at work. So what's the story about?
It's a story about someone missing out on the work and the
presence of God in the world because he numbed his way
through life with sumptuous feasting.
Feasting so much that it distracted him from being able
to see that God had placed a man right at his feet.
That God was committed to helping.
But this man missed it. And the wealthy guy could have
been a part of it. So Jesus uses a well known story
that functioned in society as a distraction from reality, which
causes people to miss out on the kinds of connections that the
Kingdom is meant to bring. And then he tweaks the story
just enough to make it a story about a man who couldn't see the
Kingdom of God unfolding in front of him because he was way
too into high living and fancy food.
His wealth and riches and abundance got in the way of
seeing and participating in something that God was doing.
A story that functioned like distraction and a story that is
about distraction. It's about numbing.
OK, so why does Jesus tell this story?
Let's just keep digging. The reason that Jesus tells a
story is revealed in the text by Luke, because Luke tells us who
Jesus is telling the story to. Just a few verses before that,
just a few verses before Jesus tells this story, Luke gives us
a clue. He says this.
He says the Pharisees, who were lovers of money were listening
to all of these things and were scoffing at him.
Ah, says Jesus, I should tell a story about a rich man who's
well fed. The Pharisees were religious
leaders of the day, and they were steeped in this tradition
and the study of the Hebrew scriptures.
And they lived really cushioned lives with well paid positions.
And they kept their distance from the poor, particularly
those who had diseases like leprosy, for fear that those
people were unclean and therefore would make them
unclean. So they created this distance
between them. And so Jesus tells a story about
a rich man dressed in fine clothes, dining at fancy tables,
only to realize in the next life that they had missed the things
that God was doing. And then he says this again.
We're in the story. He says, I beg you father, this
is the rich man begging Abraham to send him the poor man to my
father's house, for I have 5 brothers, that he may warn them
so that they will not also come into this place of torment.
Abraham replied, Well they have Moses and the prophets.
Well who did? Who did the Pharisees have?
They had Moses and the prophets. They were steeped in the ancient
Hebrew scriptures, they should listen to them.
He said to him, if they do not listen to Moses and the
prophets, neither will they be convinced even if somebody were
to rise from the dead. Even the people who have Moses
and the prophets, namely the Pharisees, are likely to miss
what God is doing right under their noses if they live their
life like the rich man. So Jesus uses a well known story
that kept people ungrounded in reality of their life together
in the real world. And he told the story in a way
that highlighted how the abundance of our lives can dull
us to the presence of God. And he told it to a group of
people he was trying to help warn so they would not miss the
Kingdom of God. Ungrounded in reality, dulled to
the presence of God, missing out on the Kingdom.
That's what the story's about. So we've been in this teaching
series over the past couple of weeks on the passions.
And if you were with us a number of weeks ago, one of the ways
that we described the passions is to say that the passions,
these forces, these desires and attitudes and sometimes
obsessive emotions and thoughts that are our work inside of us.
That much of the time, these desires and thoughts, they work
their way out in our everyday actions and habits in our lives.
And the kind of overall thesis is, is if you were to take a
look at your life, if you were to take a look at my life too,
by the way, and you were to see all of the weird little habits
or the obsessive thought patterns that we kind of get
looped up in, and you were to sort of trace that thread all
the way back. It is a thread that is tied
somewhere in a deep, deep knot inside of our soul, and God
wants to heal it and untie the knot to help us live lives that
are worthy of the thing that we have been called to.
That is sort of the thesis of this whole thing.
And the men and women on their journey of formation in the
first few centuries after the death of Jesus, they developed
some sort of kind of preliminary psychological tradition that
began to recognize that there were all sorts of things that
were getting in the way of their efforts to learn the ways of God
and to follow the way of Jesus. And to pray and to love with
self sacrifice and to stay present to the reality of their
lives and the things that we're getting in the way.
They sort of kind of formed patterns.
And as they got together and they compared notes, they had
this sort of moment like, oh, like, like you too.
Like, like you have that thing going on all of the time in the
back of your mind or that habit is something that you also
struggle with. They begin to compare notes and
they begin to realize that many of the struggles that I might be
having in my thoughts or emotions and the way that those
come out sideways are probably similar to the ways that those
are working out in your life. And here's the thing.
Most of us tend to gravitate to one or two really strong desires
or thought patterns that can begin to form and shape some
really deep patterns in our life.
And those patterns, they form habits and they begin to form
coping mechanisms in our life. And those patterns even begin to
form our personality. And what we know from scientists
and neuroscientists and social scientists is that much of who
you are today, much of who I am today, can be traced back to
patterns of thought and emotional containers that tried
to hold US 20 years ago, 10 years ago, some of you 40 years
ago. The parable that Jesus tells in
our teaching text this morning is also about these kinds of
things. There are complex arrays of
thoughts and emotions and stories that we live in that
keep us ungrounded in reality, dulled to the presence of God,
and missing out on the Kingdom of God.
And at the very center of this story that Jesus tells us is a
rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who
feasted sumptuously every single day.
So in the ancient world, if you had to categorize the passion
that this guy was struggling with, you would say that he was
dealing with a little bit of gluttony.
That's the passion for today. Gluttony is the craving for what
is more than necessary or more than you need.
And it can show up in all kinds of ways with food and drink, but
also in our particular modern context, in all kinds of
categories that we usually would not associate with gluttony.
Gluttony is the overconsumption of really anything from YouTube
Shorts to ice cream to Merlot. Like whatever your potion is, if
there is a desire to overconsume it, you have a little touch,
little simple full or or a giant container full dumping over your
body of gluttony. Whatever it is that is at your
fingertips that can pull us out of reality, can dull us to the
presence of God. And it might actually be the
thing that is preventing you from seeing the Kingdom of God
unfold in your life. That's what Jesus is talking
about. Like the the rich, well dressed,
well fed man in Jesus story. So friends, I, I, I want to get
just a little meta with you. Just a second.
I not meta as in Facebook, but it's so complex.
OK, I chose this particular teaching text this morning
because I, I don't want to focus too much energy and attention on
the overconsumption of food and drink.
I want you to really hear that I, I think there is some danger
down that path. I think it's really quite
complex, and in just a minute we are going to talk a little bit
about food and drink. But the reason that I chose this
particular text is because I think at the real heart of the
matter of gluttony is really the way that gluttony ungrounds us
in reality, numbs us to the presence of God, and causes us
to miss out on the Kingdom of God.
There is a a well known story in the prophet Ezekiel about the
destruction of two cities called Sodom and Gomorrah.
Anybody ever heard that story referenced?
OK, most of us have heard about that story in a way that is
actually a little bit off. If you actually read the 16th
chapter of the book of Ezekiel, we see that as Ezekiel
enumerates the sins of the people of Sodom, he connects
their destruction with excess food and prosperous ease.
So for Ezekiel, the people of Sodom are guilty of all kinds of
social injustice. But what got them there, what
got them down the path of ignoring the needs of the poor,
was way too much bread and a little too much wine and a
little too much ease. So the reason that the early
church fathers and mothers, they saw gluttony as one of the first
things that we ought to tend to is not because they had a hang
up with food, but because they lived in a world that was so
much suffering. That anyone who's spent too much
time thinking about the finer things of life or consuming too
much food or drink also tended to be the kind of people who
neglected the poor laying outside of their gates, which is
at the very center of the heart of God.
So writing in the 4th century early church, Father John
Chrysostom, who wrote 6 sermons on this passage in Luke, it's
very interesting. It's in a little booklet called
On Wealth and Poverty. And that guy does not pull
punches. Let me tell you this. 4th
century dudes are. But he writes this.
He says the excess that you have belongs to the poor.
The coat in your closet that you never use?
It belongs to the naked. The shoes rotting in your
possession belong to the shoeless.
The money you hoard belongs to the destitute.
Overindulgence deadens our senses to the needs of those
around us. Friends, do you guys see anybody
in need in the world right now? Your neighbors?
People in our city, I'm not in any way trying to make like a
really quick fix, but what I am trying to do is I'm trying to
help us get underneath about why is it even culturally that we
live in a system where there are lots of people who have very,
very little and so many people who have very, very much?
It's gluttony. Overindulgence deadens our
senses to the needs of those around us.
And so I want to keep circling in on what gluttony does to us.
It ungrounds us in reality. It numbs us to the presence of
God. It causes us to miss out on the
Kingdom of God, period, if we're not careful.
So let me let me first talk about reality again.
One of the early Church fathers who helped the formation
tradition learn about the passions was a man named John
Cashin. Cashin described our being
enslaved by the passions as kind of an unreality.
He writes this in his book called The Institutes.
He says the mind darkened by gluttony cannot retain spiritual
understanding. You know, I know I've shared
this in a couple of different contexts, but there was a season
in my my mid 30s where I became aware that I was using a little
bit of bourbon almost every single night to dull my senses
and the overwhelming sense of responsibility that I felt in
raising 4 kids in A1 income household.
And I'm not saying that anyone who has a little bourbon each
night or drinks regularly that that's what you're doing.
I'm telling you that that's what I was doing.
I'm simply saying that this was what was happening for me.
It was a way of me disconnecting and of not staying in it.
I was coasting through the evenings not as an addict, but
as someone who just needed to check out of the hustle and the
bustle at the end of the day in a small little act of
self-reliance and self reward. And you know what?
Praise God that it was a short season in my life that I am
grateful that God put His finger on and gave me the grace to
respond to that. The whole world is filled with
the grandeur of God as Gerald Manley Hopkins says, and I was
self medicating my way through the grandeur in a way that
dulled my senses to the glory of God.
And the post dinner cleanup and the pajama party and the story
time and the brushing of tiny teeth.
And I am so grateful that God came alongside of me and gently
just say said to me, what are you doing?
Would you like to become free of this little tiny self
medication? And would you like to become
more alive to the grandeur of the Lego mess and the toothpaste
spread all over the place? Anybody ever have that problem
with kids? I don't know where they get
these ideas. Friends, the reality of our
lives is the place where God is dwelling and any substance, food
or drink or cannabis or the flashing lights of YouTube
shorts or whatever else is at our fingertips is forever going
to be calling us towards stepping outside the real and
into the imaginary in a way that dolls our senses to the presence
of God. It numbs us to the presence of
God who is wanting to show up everywhere with bright lights in
the faces of men and women and little children in our presence.
It is no accident that the very first temptation and the center
of the downfall of our first sister Eve and our brother Adam
was the temptation to ignore the command of God in exchange for
their one food in creation that the Creator had told them not to
eat. It's such an easy slippery
slope. So let me, let me just try to
hit this straight on. Let me just talk a moment about
the passion of gluttony that shows up directly in our lives
as overconsumption or overindulgence, specifically
around food and drink. You know, in the ancient world,
food and drink were about the only ways you could distract
yourself. You know, the sun went down and
there you were in the darkness with all of your problems.
And if you were lucky, a store of food or wine would help you
get to bedtime. And so the reason that gluttony
shows up at the top of the list of the passions and most of the
literature is because it was the one thing that they thought
should be the first passion that that that we should tackle.
It's really hard to get present to your thoughts.
It's hard to take on the work of renewing your mind and attending
to your desires. They said if your belly is
stuffed full or you're slightly inebriated.
So if we think about our own lives, it's not that food and
drink have waned in their power over our lives, have they?
It's just that we have so many more options to distract us.
You know, we stand in front of the refrigerator and we just
keep looking. And my new refrigerator has an
alarm on it that says that the door is open.
And man, I got to tell you, that's, that's violence for
somebody who's in that sort of acedia, which Carl talked about
last week and standing in front of the refrigerator and it's
like Bing, bong Bing. It's like, OK, OK, let's shut
the door. I mean, even yesterday while
preparing this teaching, I visited the kitchen no less than
1/2 a dozen times to get a snack.
I mean, who wants to prep a sermon on gluttony in the year
of our Lord in 2025 when there are crinkle cut kettle chips in
the pantry? So here's the honest reality
about our modern day relationship with food.
Since the 1960s, there has been a very conscious and very
scientific development of chemically engineered, hyper
palatable and addictive foods developed in laboratories.
We that is like the closest thing to an Amen I've I've heard
today. So I'll just take it.
Yeah, so food science gave us synthetic additives and
preservatives and emulsifiers for mass production.
And within the lifespan of most of us in this room, the
emergence of the snack food industry has come to 4 The
aforementioned potato chips, one of my personal favorite, the
sugary breakfast cereals, the package cookies.
They became a staple of most American homes and sugar and fat
and salt became central to what industry scientists like Howard
Moskowitz termed in the late 1980s as the bliss point to
describe the perfect flavor combination that keeps people
eating. Food companies began using
consumer psychology and neuroscience to optimize
cravings and engineered foods for from optimal addiction.
You guys know that that's been happening, right?
OK, so in the early 2000's the term ultra processed foods was
introduced, coined by Brazilian nutritionist Carlos Montario and
it became the industry standard practice.
And along with it, the rise of low cost, calorie dense foods
designed for speed, shelf life, profit margins have within one
generation completely redesigned the way that food works in our
modern society. And the result has been the rise
of obesity and metabolic disease.
This is the facts. And just in the past decade,
neuroscientists have begun to do studies and concluded that food
addiction in our modern age parallels drug abuse with
similar brain reward circuit changes and cravings and
withdrawal symptoms. Listen friends, being a human is
really hard. There's no doubt about that.
If, if, if you have come to a different conclusion than that,
I would love to have a conversation with you.
But in the midst of the hardship of being a human, there are
cultural forces and scientists that are doing everything they
can to give us easy access to the things that can numb our
senses and distract us from the things right outside of our home
or even within our home that God is wanting us to become present
to. There's this moment on the cross
where Jesus is in his final hours.
He's suffering the full weight of the sin of the world, and the
soldiers OfferUp to him a sponge filled with strong wine.
Let's take away a little bit of that pain.
Now what does he do? He refuses it.
Why? Because the moment was
important. God was doing something.
He wanted to be fully present to it.
And friends, some of what God is wanting to make us present to is
the pain and the suffering of others so that we can join God
in the work of doing justice and loving the mercy of God.
So much so that we would extend the mercy of God to the one in
front of us and to show up fully in person as an ambassador of
the love of God to the person right outside of our gate.
But often times a first step in being able to see the pain and
the suffering of another is to enter into the pain and the
suffering in our own self. Our capacity to work alongside
of God for justice and mercy is contingent on the capacity for
us to allow God to do those things in US first.
I mean, listen, friends, everyone knows that it is much
easier to crush a pint of ice cream than it is to feel
loneliness and to let that loneliness remind you of the
people that you need. But it will be so much better.
And I bet I would eat a lot less ice cream if in the loneliness.
I called a couple of friends and I told them what I was facing.
So, friends, if food and drink is becoming for us a slow
addiction and a means of self medication, what we know to be
true is that addiction is a symptom of disconnection.
In the story that Jesus tells in Luke's gospel, there's this
great chasm that separated the rich man from the poor man.
And the chasm was made visible in the story in the next life,
but it only revealed how great the chasm actually was in the
real life. And so here's what I would love
to do, if it's possible. Would you just be willing to set
aside for a moment all of the complexities around diet culture
and body image? I know that that's a heavy lift.
Just try set those questions aside.
And could you bring this question before God in prayer?
God, is there any way that I am using food or alcohol or sugar
or cannabis or YouTube or Facebook?
Is there anything that I am over consuming or using to numb
myself to the realities of my life or the lives of those
around me? Just take a minute.
I I just invite you, even just right now, just God, is there
anything that you would want to bring my attention to?
Just to see if God would bring something to your mind.
I just pray in the name of Jesus against any shame because that
is not how God operates. And if it is food or sugar or
alcohol for some other substance, what might it be for
you to let someone in on that stroke?
To get some help? To reach out to someone and let
them know that your relationship with food is complex or there's
a substance that's robbing you of presence?
The Lord is gracious and compassionate.
I'm going to say one more thing and then we'll read together our
our liturgy to close. Why are we doing a series on the
passions? Why are we talking about this
stuff? It's because we desire to be a
community that joins God in the work of mercy and justice and
demonstrating with our real lives the infinite love of God
for all people. And I am just aware there are so
many things in my life that are getting in the way of that task.
And we can say yes to the healing power of God.
And so however you would want to respond this morning, one of the
things I have loved about this church for 20 years is that of
all of the churches I've ever been a part of, this church is a
place where we get to show up and deal with reality, what's
actually true about our lives without any judgement, without
any shame. That together we can lay hands
on one another, we can pray for one another.
We can say come Holy Spirit, and that we can expect that the
healing power of God is going to be in our midst.
So I want to invite you to read this with me as we head into our
ministry time together. We say I am infinitely loved by
God, and God's infinite love is in the process of healing
everything in me that clings to false things.
The invitation of God is to allow God to be the divine
physician. The medicine of God is God's own
loved, poured out into my heart through the Holy Spirit.
We have the worship team come back up.
The kids will be coming in shortly.
We're going to head into a time of worship and prayer.